Petition “Pluralism, now!”

Some contextual and background information relevant to understanding the issue

For a long time, France was a country in which various approaches to economics were able to coexist. Thus in the 1970s, regulation theory, an approach that draws on both the Keynesian and Marxist traditions, played a major role. Similarly, at the beginning of the 1990s, the economics of convention, located in the area between economics and sociology, had a lasting influence. This pluralism, in which economics was a genuine arena of argumentation and debate, began to disintegrate in the mid-1990s. […] Read full article

FAPE Open letter to Jean Tirole: “Intellectual diversity is not a source of obscurantism and relativism but rather of innovations and discoveries!” – January 2015

Where is our economic system going? What about our societies? How did we get here? And what next?

The current situation reveals not only an economic crisis but also a deep crisis of economic thought. There are many causes for this situation, and solutions can only be found through theoretical, practical and political inventiveness with our critical faculties to the fore. But, whilst such voices do exist, they have been silenced as far as orthodox economics is concerned. Simply put, there are profoud institutional barriers to the emergence and presentation of original thinking, but this blocked creativity could be released through a simple and immediate political solution. Establishing in French universities a new section, entitled Economics and Society, would allow a new way of thinking in economics.

Madam Minister, you recently decided to create this new section promoting the study of economic facts with a renewed perspective within rather than apart from social sciences. You did so because you know how much the research in economics and its teaching, but also public debate, are suffocated by the monopoly of ideas imposed by a dominant school of thought that failed to anticipate or even to allow for, let alone understand and respond to this crisis.
The proposal for this new section, and your commendable approval for it, unleashed such a backlash from the established orthodoxy that it seemed to persuade you to withdraw your support.
For these reasons, by reaffirming your support for this petition for pluralism in economics, we demand that you publish the decree that you already signed in order finally to create this new section.

Dans le cadre de son nouveau programme de recherche intitulé “Joint production and co-production of public goods and commons : Source of a paradigm shift through creative destruction of public action?”, le CIRIEC appelle à contribution selon les modalités suivantes…